Oakland mayor frontrunners, from left, Treva Reid, Ignacio De La Fuente, Loren Taylor and Sheng Thao. (Staff and Courtesy Photos)
OAKLAND — Whoever is elected next week as the city’s new mayor has already spent months promising voters that they are best poised to curb alarmingly high levels of gun violence, or at least do a better job of it than outgoing Mayor Libby Schaaf.
Crime is the election’s defining issue, with ever-increasing stakes as violence climbed during the pandemic and shows little sign of letting up. As of Oct. 30, overall crime is up 6% over last year, despite a 7% overall drop in the most serious violent crimes, according to Oakland Police Department stats.
There have been 107 homicides so far this year, 10 fewer than at the same time last year, although still a deadly pace. Assaults with firearms are down 14% from last year at this time. But rapes, carjackings and burglaries are up — 8%, 9% and 12%, respectively. Nearly every community has been affected, and the perception that crime is rampant is hard to overcome.
Confronting those numbers, the four leading mayoral candidates — Loren Taylor, Sheng Thao, Treva Reid and Ignacio De La Fuente — all are pushing to hire more cops, a stance at odds with what some of them were saying just a few years ago. Voters could be forgiven for wondering how to distinguish among their current positions.
The problem itself has more facets than the candidates’ approaches. A swell of assaults and robberies in Oakland’s Chinatown last year prompted activism to combat anti-Asian hate. A 13-week span last fall in the San Antonio neighborhood left 8 people dead. During an 18-hour stretch of gun violence in September, four people were killed and five others seriously wounded.
The September shootings put the police chief under pressure to show some immediate progress, but there have been 12 more people killed since then.
A poll released by the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce last month revealed 97% of residents believe gun violence is an extremely or very serious issue, with a majority saying they want more police officers in Oakland and three in five saying the town is on the wrong track.
No matter who wins the highest office at City Hall, the crime-related trauma left behind can’t easily be undone.
When Taylor, Thao and De La Fuente spoke directly to residents at an East Oakland community event last month intended to address violence and sex-trafficking, emcee Leonor Godinez reminded the candidates multiple times to stop listing off their policy records and speak instead from the heart.
“It’s awkward and disappointing,” Godinez, a member of the San Antonio neighborhood council, said after the event about the on-stage political jousting. “They were very much into their campaign materials.”
All four leading candidates prioritize additional officers above prevention strategies that don’t involve law enforcement until the crisis of violence eases up. None of them offered a fresh strategy to reduce crime that differs from the current administration.
De La Fuente, a political veteran who last served on the council in 2012, has frequently attacked the other three frontrunners, saying they have neglected, in their current jobs on the council, to give Oakland police the funding it needs. Of all the candidates, he expresses the least patience for talk of police alternatives.
“The three full-time council members are getting paid by the taxpayers and they’re campaigning 24-7,” De La Fuente said in an interview. “Crime is off the hook… We’ve got to get police all the tools they need – not tomorrow, but yesterday.”
None of those three council members has ever actively defunded Oakland police; in fact, the actually voted to increase the department’s budget last year.
At the start of November, the department had 700 sworn officers out of 726 funded by the city. That’s a significant increase from the 669 officers the department on hand after a period of attrition at the end of 2021, said Barry Donelan of the Oakland Police Officers Association.
But when the murder of George Floyd and a national reckoning on race put the Bay Area’s law enforcement agencies under a microscope, Taylor and Thao adopted policy stances aligning with the view that police already had enough money.
In June 2020, Taylor helped propose a “reimagining public safety” task force that would look at cutting the Oakland police department’s general fund dollars in half over a two-year period by finding alternatives to public safety. It was a counter proposal to a much more immediate slash to funding proposed by council members Nikki Fortunato Bas and Rebecca Kaplan.
“It was not a firm commitment — it was a compromise that I made in order to move us forward,” Taylor said in a recent interview. “Ideally, in 10-15 years, we’ll be on a path to having less need for enforcement and having less costs associated… but right now, we have to worry about the immediate.”
Thao, meanwhile, last year proposed adding two more police academies to the four already planned in Oakland, reversing course from her previous vote with the majority of the council — combined with her vocal resistance at the time — to adding a fifth academy that Schaaf had proposed in the city’s budget.
Thao has insisted she never flip-flopped, as Taylor’s campaign has criticized her for doing, saying she had always wanted to work with the police chief to revive discussions of an additional academy when the idea was “more fleshed out.”
“I think my balanced approach is the right one and I think Councilmember Taylor’s inability to find common ground is part of what sets us apart in this race,” Thao said in response to emailed questions. “We need results, not rhetoric.”
Reid, elected in 2020, was not around for the original debates about reimagining public safety. Her campaign has pushed to make police spending a priority, wanting not just to hire more officers but also equip the department with more technology.
“We’ve got to get sworn officers that we’ve budgeted for in place,” Reid said. “I believe that we can leverage the funding that we have to do this.”
In addition to calling for more officers, the incumbent council members have championed MACRO, a non-police intervention program that directs certain emergency calls, such as mental health crises, to the fire department and social services programs.
The candidates have also supported keeping automated license-plate reader cameras, which some privacy advocates have criticized as amounting to surveillance, and Reid in particular has been outspoken about Shotspotter technology
Donelan, the police union president, said MACRO could be an invaluable tool for taking certain emergency response calls off the police’s hands. But he criticized the program for not getting off the ground fast enough, saying it has responded to only a couple dozen calls in the past two months after launching earlier this year.
Staff writer Harry Harris contributed to this report
Originally published at Shomik Mukherjee